Farcical as it was, it kept Leon free. And Ronnie, who had impulsively told Artimus during the craziness that Leon was out of the band, quickly relented. Life went on for Skynyrd. But Dowd, who hadn’t signed on to save psychos from themselves and jail, was a nervous wreck. He insisted later that he’d had enough of the band: “I checked out the next morning and that’s where I broke off with them.”
Actually, he didn’t do that, not then, maybe not ever. After a few days’ delay for Leon to get his addled head together, Dowd conducted a few sessions at Studio One, which were mainly devoted to rerecording all but one of the tracks cut at Criteria. Ronnie then told him that it might help the project if another producer was called in to collaborate. That had to really hurt Dowd. He hadn’t been fired but, highly offended, he now broke off. The next day when the session was supposed to begin, people milled about the studio asking, “Where’s Tom?” The answer was, back in Miami, not having said a word to anyone that he was going.
Now, needing just one producer, Ronnie called Rodney Mills, the Doraville engineer who had crowded Al Kooper out on Nuthin’ Fancy. Mills had an easygoing manner that the band preferred over the autocratic styles of Kooper and Dowd. And Mills, who had been working as road manager for the Atlanta Rhythm Section, jumped at the chance, quitting his work on tour with the Section to take the job, which had him working hand in hand with Kevin Elson, who now knew how to reproduce the Skynyrd sound in concert better than anyone.
Dowd did eventually send an emissary to Doraville, engineer Barry Rudolph, a studio veteran who had just helped produce a Waylon Jennings album. When he got there, Rudolph was stunned to find that the entire album had been unofficially completed. “I didn’t know exactly what I was doing there,” he says. Rudolph, who considered Mills and Elson to be no more than engineers, thought some of the songs needed a lot of work and wanted to rerecord them, for a third time, fourth in all. These included “That Smell” and “What’s Your Name.” But getting anything done was a strain. Although the sessions did run clean and sober, Rudolph says, “a couple of their buddies would come in and get ’em going, like Robert Nix, he’d do things like hold up a joint in the middle of the control room. They would be in the middle of the best take and would stop playing and go ahead and smoke it. They nearly killed me. We would work ’til about two or three in the morning, and then they would want to go out and party. Being local heroes, it was pretty much carte blanche everywhere they went: anything they wanted, as much as they wanted…. We’d get back to the hotel at ten in the morning. By the end of the week I was fried.”
Whether Dowd fully intended to work with them again was unclear. But Skynyrd couldn’t worry about that now. With Dowd physically gone, and believing he was holding them back anyway, they went to work with Rudolph, the priority being the most commercially oriented song, “What’s Your Name,” which was Ronnie’s most overt attempt at a three-minute hit. Recycling the beat of “Gimme Three Steps,” the Van Zant-Rossington composition—which Dowd and Steve Cropper, the fabled Stax/Volt guitarist, helped develop during the Criteria sessions, though they were stiffed of writing credits—told a semifable of a night “in Boise, Idaho,” when Ronnie had picked up a “little queen” in a bar before the band was evicted from the room for making “a mess,” and then not quite being able to remember her name during and after a strenuous night with her. As with many Van Zant songs, though, in the underbrush lay a trace of guilt about living such an amoral life and betraying his wife for the carnal conquests of the rock ethos. True to form, this Van Zant lyric was more than met the ear and more than he probably realized.
Those clues to the man’s humanity, so often buried within a hard crust of conceit and redneck smugness, were even harder to decipher in the song’s delirious blues-bar, horn-heavy arrangement and hip, redneck chic—“What’s your name, little girl? What’s your name? / Shootin’ you straight, little girl? Won’t you do the same?”—that made the song irresistible from the first note. The best to come from the album, however, was a song Ronnie never expected would be a single, given his determination that, if other tracks were to be compromised, he would compensate with a song that would push the boundaries of pop music. He had been wanting to get off his chest what he thought of Gary’s self-induced brushes with death, and the other guys’ misadventures with drugs and booze; and he didn’t plan to spare himself from the warning none of them would obey. The result, “That Smell,” moved the earth in a way no Skynyrd song ever did.
Indeed, oblique references to George Wallace and Watergate and pointed blandishments about senseless gun violence seemed tame beside Ronnie’s magnifying glass into drug culture. Before then, drug references begat in pop songs were usually metaphorical (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Got to Get You into My Life,” “Eight Miles High”). Few rock lyrics spoke of actual drugs or used street terms for them; among those that did, “One Toke Over the Line” was an endorsement of harmless “sweet Jesus” drug escapism. The more cautionary songs—“Life in the Fast Lane,” “Witchy Woman,” “Gold Dust Woman”—weaved unmistakable but still a bit hazy quatrains about silver spoons and lines on mirrors.
Ronnie had waded deeply into this same metaphorical pool with “The Needle and the Spoon,” in the more starkly admonitory tone of John Lennon’s “Cold Turkey.” But now he left nothing to imagination. He dropped in curdling caveats about “too much coke and too much smoke” and having “another blow for your nose.” The message was in the hook: “the smell of death surrounds you.” Each line was more harrowing and delicious than the one before it, though it was hard to top the opening line, with Rossington’s squealing guitar and trail-away feedback prefacing a reference meant squarely for him—“Whiskey bottles and brand new cars / Oak tree, you’re in my way.” At one point Van Zant tauntingly sang of “Prince Charming,” using Gary’s nickname. But while such taunts were aimed at the prince, admonitions like “one hell of a price for you to get your kicks” and “look what’s going on inside you” were aimed just as squarely at himself, the biggest fool of all.
With its tightly integrated solo guitar tradeoffs, foot-tapping beat, and gospel-like harmonies by the Honkettes—their wail of “Yeah, you!” after the hook was priceless—the song was dark hearted and completely infectious. Indeed, if “Sweet Home Alabama” was Skynyrd’s “Ramblin’ Man,” one could call “That Smell” their “Hotel California,” a connection Barry Rudolph was thinking about when he engineered the song, saying later, “I was going for that sort of production.” But it was more, more too than Eric Clapton’s cover the same year of J.J. Cale’s grim “Cocaine,” equating the white powder with a seductress who “don’t lie.” Skynyrd had concocted the first, and still the coolest, drug-and-death song ever.
As cutting-edge as “The Smell” was, Skynyrd refrained from making it so dark that it would be turbid rather than entertaining. And as it turned out, in the midst of disco’s ascent, the song’s upbeat, Diesel-powered beat could even pass as a dance record. And everyone knew it would be heard, that it was hit material, and would have to be put out as a single for all these reasons, even though it was the longest cut on the album, over five and a half minutes—and that, says Rudolph, was after MCA cut the original two-minute guitar intro. Even with a harrowing theme, Skynyrd’s formula remained the same; “simple man” lyrics—as Ronnie once said, “I think if you write it really simple, then you can reach more people that way because people are going to understand what you’re talking about”—combined with ear-splitting levels of aural escapism and open-wound emotion.
“A lot of the songs that Ronnie wrote,” said Artimus Pyle, “had to do, directly or indirectly, with family, you know, and about the environment, about gun control, about the abuse of drugs. It wasn’t like trying to cram it down, but it was about the real world.” In the case of “That Smell,” it was an all-too-real world. But Ronnie wasn’t through. He had written perhaps his best collection of songs for the album, which was why he had been so puzzled about why
they didn’t fly as recorded by Dowd.
What was most welcome was the entrée of Steve Gaines as a valuable collaborator. He and Van Zant wrote “You Got That Right,” another fatalistic “live fast, die young” avowal, attesting, “I tried everything in my life / Things I like I try ’em twice” and “When my time’s up, I’ll hold my own / You won’t find me in an old folks’ home.” The twist was that it was sung as a duet between the two, Gaines’s melodic blues burr cranking up Ronnie’s prickly conviction, making for a whole new, and endearing, Skynyrd mode.
Gaines, in fact, was given tremendous rein on the album, which featured one more song cowritten by him and Ronnie—“I Never Dreamed,” with Ronnie projecting about death again, this time with dread: “I never dreamed that you would leave me / But now you’re gone,” leaving him “empty” and “lonely” and desperately pleading, “I never dreamed that I would beg you / Woman I need you now.” This was projection writing from the pit of Ronnie’s tortured soul, and it had never before been brought out the way it was by Steve, whose slide guitar country funk and quiet harmony vocals were especially pungent on those tunes and the two others he had written alone. On those two, “I Know a Little,” an old-time jazz/swing riff, and “Ain’t No Good Life,” Ronnie allowed their newest member that rare privilege of singing lead, something he had not done since Rickey Medlocke.
Gaines’s guttural blues timber was more Joe Cocker than Ronnie Van Zant, but not at all against the Skynyrd grain, and his sinewy guitar and Powell’s Ray Manzarek-like organ line brought the band exactly to where Ronnie had wanted to be for years: into the realm of real blues, not just a countrified version. Indeed, the level of sophistication on the album was revelatory; if songs had been trenchant before, now they had more depth and introspection, even if they were despondent. The guitars were still front and center, and they knocked down walls at times; but they did so within a quieter, even holistic sort of entirety. Gaines even had a hand in making “That Smell” so satisfying, by arranging the Doraville redo.
Ronnie completed the album with a convincing cover of Merle Haggard’s “Honky Tonk Night Time Man” and a track from the unreleased Muscle Shoals tapes produced by Jimmy Johnson that he always liked, the Van Zant-Rossington song “One More Time.” Because the song had Ed King and Rickey Medlocke on it, both would be given credits on the album jacket—a jacket that foretold just how little time Lynyrd Skynyrd had left before Lucifer came to the door.
17
STRIKING FIRE AND DRAWING BLOOD
Even now, despite not showing up to the band’s sessions, Tom Dowd had still not officially quit as Skynyrd’s producer. Whether he ever considered working with them again seemed a moot point since his time was monopolized by the Rod Stewart album, sessions for which were held in Miami, Canada, and L.A. Dowd was also newly wed and trying to find time for his new wife. He hadn’t heard a thing more about Skynyrd until he was in L.A. mixing down the Stewart LP and was told the Skynyrd album was being mixed at Capitol Records, Rodney Mills and Kevin Elson having taken the tapes out to that state-of-the-art facility.
“They’re what?!” he asked, clearly shocked at the news. He got in his car, drove to Capitol, and burst into the studio where Mills and Elson were going about their work.
“Man, you left us!” said Elson.
Dowd had kept in touch enough with Doraville to know that whatever had been accomplished, several songs still needed horns added to them. “We didn’t finish making the album, how can you be mastering? We have to put horns on.”
They told him they’d already put horns on one cut but that the brass didn’t sound right.
“Give me the goddamn tape and I’ll put horns on it for you in about an hour and a half.”
Dowd made some calls, carted the tapes to the Wally Heider mobile studio and overdubbed the horns. Two hours later, he delivered the tapes to Ronnie, who’d come west with Mills.
“That’s it! You’re right!” Dowd quotes Ronnie as saying.
At that point, according to Dowd’s take, the band wanted him to continue mixing the entire album, but he was too busy with Rod Stewart. By then, too, a bizarre situation had developed concerning the album jacket. The liner notes, which had already been written, omitted any mention of Dowd, even though the band recognized his engineer at Criteria, Dennis Herkendorfer. The glaring omission would spark rumors that they were either being vindictive or that Dowd, in a fit of pique, had asked that his name be left out of the credits because he hadn’t produced the entire LP. Ronnie didn’t make things any clearer when he later said of the matter, “We love Tom Dowd … but we [didn’t] want him to mix this record,” which sounded a lot like what Skynyrd had said about Al Kooper when his end came. In any event, the band directed that future releases of the album credit Dowd, as well as Mills and Jimmy Johnson, a retro shout-out to the old Muscle Shoals duo, who never got to see their own Skynyrd tapes released as a complete album—ten of the twenty-seven tracks would trickle onto two retrospective albums in 1978 and 1991—until 1998, when Bruce Eder, on AllMusic.com, ventured that the work, called Skynyrd’s First: The Complete Muscle Shoals Album, “may be the greatest unissued first album ever to surface from a major band.”
Skynyrd had always felt constrained by producers, and although Mills was a major factor in keeping the album on track, the band now believed they were the best producers for their music. And having done what MCA asked, Ronnie saw no further need to be a pop songwriter.
“That’s the last time I ever write a three-minute song, as long as I fuckin’ live,” he swore. “If I want to write a book, I’m going to write a book and not a piece of toilet paper.”
Of course, the album was nothing of the kind. Nor was it close to playing it safe. They called it Street Survivors, but rather than this being merely metaphorical, they explained to designer George Osaki that they wanted to be seen, looking weathered and wiser, as literally threatened by some force closing in on them, as if they were the sole survivors of apocalyptic doom—a premise that could be extrapolated from the impending doom of “That Smell” but which Ronnie saw in a thousand different ways. Osaki hired photographer David Alexander, who had designed the cover of the Eagles’ Desperado and Hotel California and albums by Linda Ronstadt, the Marshall Tucker Band, and the Sex Pistols.
Alexander took the most visually striking route. Posing them on a movie set on the back lot at MCA/Universal studios between facades of baroque buildings, their faces dour, Artimus in a VEGETARIAN T-shirt, Leon in one reading MY GRASS IS BLUE—a reference not to weed but to bluegrass music—Alexander detonated flames from gasoline-filled troughs in front of and behind them. The motif was supposed to be Skynyrd coming into town and setting it on fire. However, a more disturbing scene emerged—Skynyrd being consumed by flames, particularly Gaines, clad in a devilish red shirt, arms at his sides, eyes closed, in some kind of ritualistic satanic immolation. It was jarring, unnerving, even shocking, and portended something awful, though one could also have seen it as symbolic of the three-guitar Skynyrd attack that the astute rock critic Greil Marcus had once described as “striking fire and drawing blood.”
In truth, the album would have had no trouble gaining attention, no matter the cover. It was long awaited and would not disappoint. Robert Christgau analyzed it as a sum of more than its parts: “As with too many LPs by good road bands, each side here begins with two strong cuts and then winds down. The difference is that the two strong cuts are very strong and the weak ones gain presence with each listen.” Yet it was that cover with those engulfing flames that would turn the album into a prophecy, all too soon and all too horribly fulfilled.
Though it was largely a sham, Skynyrd kept up the public pretense of being “reformed” rednecks. Kicking off another of their seamless tours, they did their usual round of media interviews, this time pushing the party line of reformation. Not everyone, or even most, bought it. Headlines in the rock press still read more like those in the supermarket tabloids—ROUGH, ROWDY, RIBALD ROCK
, ONE MO’ BRAWL FROM THE ROAD, HANGING OUT WITH LYNYRD SKYNYRD CAN GET YOU SHOT, SLEAZY RIDERS, LYNYRD SKYNYRD: DOES THER CONSCIENCE BOTHER THEM? When Time got around to noticing them in October 1976, the headline they ran was THE ROTGUT LIFE. And as late as September 1977 there was a Skynyrd article with the not altogether exaggerated title A BLOOD BATH EVERY NIGHT. All this being the case, it stood to reason that, as Crawdaddy’s Mitch Glazer posited, a dose of Skynyrd “goes down better if you’re a little wrecked.”
Pressing on through the summer, the band rolled into Philadelphia’s massive JFK Stadium on June 11, agreeing to open for Peter Frampton, the British teen-idol guitarist whose 1976 live double album Frampton Comes Alive! sold six million copies just that year, humbling even the exemplary sales of One More from the Road. Yet after three Top 20 singles Frampton was losing some sheen. That day in Philly was not kind to him, in large part due to Skynyrd. It was another of those all-day affairs with hundred-thousand-plus crowds, and another chance for Skynyrd to eat the headliner’s lunch. And after their set a good half of the crowd walked out as Frampton played what Pete Rudge assistant Chris Charlesworth recalled as a “very limp closing set.”
Skynyrd, he said, hadn’t even needed to exert themselves very much to steal the show. “They’d played an hour-long set—short for them—and restricted themselves to their best-known songs with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of swagger. ‘Free Bird’ brought that huge crowd to their feet and as I watched from the side of the stage, just behind their amplifiers, it seemed to me that all 100,000 of them were stomping and cheering as the band played faster and faster to the song’s stupendous finale.”
Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars Page 26